Assignment

The pouring rain wasn’t the issue. God knows he’d gotten soaked by worse while on jobs before. The lack of notice wasn’t the issue. How many times had he been bullied into an assignment without a scrap of consideration for the other things he had going on? It wasn’t even the target, though he wasn’t all that thrilled with having to look down the scope at a new mother and contemplate whether he should take the shot before or after she left the nursery. It wasn’t even the fact that he’d been asking for non-terminal assignments for about six months now, and they haven’t even bothered to pretend that they lost the paperwork. They were just ignoring it.

It wasn’t any of these things, so he couldn’t really understand why his hands were shaking as he rearranged the short-legged tripod and tried to keep rain from messing with the lens, couldn’t really understand why the back of his throat felt like fire as he crouched on the roof, couldn’t understand why his heart was pounding in a way that suggested his last cup of coffee might’ve been spiked.

“Fucking Starbucks,” he muttered, and wipes cool drops from his brow before they drip into his eyes.

Through the scope he could see her singing a lullabye; her lips moved as she gently rocked and swayed the tiny cooing thing who’d be an orphan in about sixteen seconds or less, and he sang along, without realizing.